In August 2018, before Qualcomm releases a new chip, Huawei took the lead in releasing Kirin 980, the world's first artificial smartphone chip based on 7 nanometer technology, which integrates 6.9 billion transistors and achieves a comprehensive improvement in performance and energy efficiency. Kirin 980 is a commercial product based on ARM Cortex-A76, with a maximum main frequency of 2.6 GHz. Before the mass production of Snapdragon 855, Huawei Mate 20 series models and Honor Magic 2, equipped with Kirin 980 chips, occupied the top three in the smartphone performance rankings for more than a month in a row, with the intention of unifying the world.

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Huawei Kirin 980 has created the first in many aspects, such as the first Cortex-A76 CPU core, Mali-G76 GPU core, LPDDR4X-2133 memory, dual NPU and so on. There are many highlights. Kirin 980, which has generation difference advantage, has crushed snapdragon 845 on CPU, GPU, AI and energy efficiency, leading by more than 30%.

However, with Lenovo's release of the world's first smartphone product with Qualcomm's snapdragon 855, Kirin 980 chips will not have much time to dominate in terms of performance. In the first half of next year, Huawei will upgrade the Kirin processor on its flagship cell phone P30, but the latest news about the processor has come out.

Recently, Mishaal Rahman, editor-in-chief of XDA, said through Twitter that Huawei's new processor would be named Kirin 985, and other information besides its name is still unclear.

If the exposure is true, then it is certain that Kirin 985 will be a small modified processor of Kirin 980, still using 7 nanometer process, but the probability will increase the main frequency. After all, the highest main frequency of Qualcomm Kirin 855 is 2.84 GHz, which is much stronger than that of Kirin 980.

The suffix of 5 is not the first time that it appears on Kirin chips. Previously, Huawei has introduced small modification chips including Kirin 935, Kirin 955 and so on.